Esther Seiden
Born: 1908 in West Galicia, Poland
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Esther Seiden was born in a small town in Poland to an upper middle class,
Jewish family. She attended her town’s small public elementary school up until fourth
grade. After that, she was taught primarily by private tutors. At the end of each year she
would travel to a bigger city to take her end of year examinations which enabled her to
move on to the next grade. At some point during her childhood, Esther discovered that
she had a gift for mathematics.
In 1927, she began her higher education at the University of Krakow. She then
transferred to the Stefan Batory University in Wilno where she obtained a Magistar of
Philosophy. A Magistar of Philosophy was the lowest degree one could obtain and
would allow her to teach at the high school level.
Esther moved to Warsaw, Poland for a while where she also studied at the
University of Warsaw. She taught first grade at an elementary school there from 1932 to
1934. She moved to Palestine in 1935 and taught high school for five years. After that,
she just happened to obtain a job at the Government Department of Statistics.
After deciding that she would like to pursue a career in statistics, she then traveled
to the University of California at Berkeley, were she received her doctorate in statistics.
While she was at UC Berkeley, Seiden worked under Jerzy Neyman. Upon obtaining her
doctorate, Seiden worked at many universities including Howard University,
Northwestern, and Michigan State. Esther began working at Michigan State in 1960 and
stayed until her retirement in 1978.
Esther Seiden became interested in experimental design and did a lot of her work
in this field. She worked with such topics as orthogonal arrays, Latin squares, sum
composition and F-squares. She made many contributions to the field of statistics
throughout the course of her career, and even continued to do research after her
retirement.
The information contained in this biography was obtained from the following source(s):
Samuel-Cahn, Ester. “A Conversation with Esther Seiden.” Statistical Science 7 (1992):
339-357.